Natural Disasters

On October 10, ICLR held a Friday Forum workshop entitled ‘National Riverine Floodplain Mapping Framework and Advancements in Urban Overland Flood Risk Assessment’, which largely looked at the state of flood mapping in Canada. The workshop was lead by Tim…

While groundwater figures prominently in riverine and urban flooding and is relatively easy to map, insurers, urban planners, governments and other key stakeholders seldom factor it in when considering flood risk. So says Dr. Cathy Ryan, a hydrogeologist with the…

It was raining in Oakville, but it was nothing worth writing home about, just a normal run-of-the-mill summer storm. But as soon as I crossed the boundary into Burlington, that changed. I was quite amazed at the experience: after a…

The scientific evidence is overwhelming that humans are changing the climate due to their unbridled use of fossil fuels. Yet despite the scientific consensus (and, yes, there is consensus), there are those that insist on denying that anthropogenic (i.e. human…

The EF2 tornado that tore through Angus, Ontario June 17 damaged 102 recently built homes in the small community located just west of Barrie. Ten or 11 homes lost their roofs entirely. These homes will have to be razed and…

In its Second Quarter 2014 update, Aon Benfield Securities reported that catastrophe bond issuance hit a record high US$ 4.5 billion – the most of any quarter in the history of the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market. The growth of the…

From an insurance perspective, essentially all of the large-loss hail events recorded in Canada have occurred in Alberta. Indeed, the top three most expensive hailers on record took place in that province. Emergency Preparedness Canada’s website lists the September 7,…

At this is being written, Western’s University’s Storm Damage Assessment Team is on the ground in Angus, Ontario working with Environment Canada (EC) to rate a tornado that ripped through town at about 5:20 p.m. on June 17. The team…

Prior to the $700 million wildfire in Slave Lake, Alberta in May 2011, ICLR was on record warning the Canadian insurance industry of a $1 billion wildfire loss event in the country. And while $700 million isn’t $1 billion (even when…

It is very common to hear a backwater valve being called a backflow valve, backflow preventer or backflow prevention device and vice versa, but the two are nowhere near being the same thing. Using an incorrect term while giving a homeowner…

Though we have to be careful about attributing the rise in disaster losses in the country solely to the poor state of public infrastructure (there are many other factors that have to be considered as well), there can be no…

As the Swiss Re graph on this page indicates, there is more often than not a wide gap between insured (blue line) and economic – or total – natural disaster losses (red line). Consider the 2013 floods in southern Alberta.…

The impact of natural catastrophes is having an ever-increasing impact on the results of insurers around the world. According to a recent report from Aon Benfield’s catastophe model development arm, natural catastrophes caused roughly $7 billion in insured losses globally…

Whenever the subject of overland flood insurance for Canadian homeowners comes up, someone invariably will warn against it by bringing up the spectre of the U.S. National Flood Insurance Program. This is somewhat understandable. Insurance premiums for NFIP coverage are…